There are 8 proven strategies highly successful people have always used to overcome obstacles to their goals. Properly applied, these same principles can also serve as a catalyst for your success.Â

1. Get Aligned
It’s important to first clearly define exactly what you are truly passionate about then find a way to become successful at that passion. Only passion stirs up the kind of energy you’ll need when you hit those inevitable bumps in the road. Set passionate goals.

2. Focus on your Priorities
Many people try to fit their dreams into their life complaining there are not enough hours in the day to make it happen. If you want your dream to become a reality, make it a priority. Otherwise it will never be more than a pipe dream, and you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment.

Making something important happen in your life requires more than just a goal it requires a REAL plan of action to get you on target! Create a realistic goal plan that fits the reality of your life.

3. Don’t Force It
Don’t try to force something that isn’t happening. Go for the type of inspired, joyful action that comes along with pursuing a goal in true alignment with your dreams. This causes things to flow along easily and without energy-consuming efforting.

Contrast this to forcing yourself to take an action you really don’t want to take. Most likely this will take you twice as long, and you’ll bump up against obstacles. Whenever possible swim with the current Â not against it. And stick to your goal plan.

4. Manage your Stress
Stress throws us off balance and into an older, less productive portion of our brain. It prepares you to fight or run. But it does not prepare you to successfully achieve a goal unless that goal is to escape a tiger.

5. Build your Strengths
Success comes easier and more quickly when you focus on your strengths, and delegate in those areas where you are less capable. Your natural talents are those things you do so easily and naturally. They contain the seeds of your greatest potential accomplishments.

t’s very important to identify and work on your natural talents and abilities. This is where self knowledge pays off in big dollars and accomplishments. And don’t forget to also your build your mind power.

6. Disarm Your Inner Saboteur
Fear of failure is the biggest internal fear most people will ever have to face. It is why so many ideas never get beyond the idea stage and why most new projects are started, but never finished.

It’s okay to have these feelings, but it is important to identify them for what they are. Most fears of failure go all the way back to childhood, and are not even accurate for who you are today. Drag them up into the daylight, and take serious action to face them head on.

7. Develop Resilience
The truth is you will have setbacks along the way. This is inevitable. The sooner you accept that, the better. Often if you look closely, you will find these setbacks are directly related to your innermost thoughts, fears and beliefs. This is because we create what we focus on, including those things we don’t want.Â Â

Don’t get stopped by these bumps in the road. Learn from them. As you work through them you will become the person you need to be to create your dreams.

And along the way, be sure to refine your stress management skills. This is an essential key to resilience!

8. Use the Power of Visualization
The muscles we use to physically take action in our lives begins in the mind. That is why all great golfers, tennis players, basketball players, dancers, etc. visualize themselves performing successfully.

An experiment conducted by Aussie psychologist Alan Richardson reported a 23% performance improvement among people who visualized every day for 20 days. Richardson found that the most effective visualization occurs when the visualize feels and sees what he is doing. Use visualization to power-up your success.

The Value of a Thought
Do you have a desire to become wealthy? OK. Then let’s play a little mental monopoly game to set an imaginary value on your mental process.

Let’s suppose that for every thought you have, you either gain or lose a dollar. Assuming you have one thought a minute, every hour would then offer a potential $60 gain or a $60 loss.

Each successful 16 hour day would then equal a potential gain of $960. But on the other hand, a single negative thought like Forget it, I’ll never make it anyway might trash four hours creating a loss of $240 on your mental balance sheet.

So, can you see how important a single thought can be to one seeking prosperity?

The Power of a Thought
Your life is not just the result of the thoughts streaming through your mind. In truth, your thoughts actually create your life.

How can that be so?

OK. Suppose you were laid off from your job. Now it’s obvious you did not create the weak economy leading to that event. BUT you ARE in total control of how you respond.

Here’s how that works: Suppose you get depressed and just give up. Your response would obviously create a negative reality in your life.

But what if you instead take the tiger by the tail and start a new business on the web. You will have then created an entirely different reality in response to the exact same event.

Life doesn’t just happen to us. It’s our response to what occurs that creates our personal reality.

Think about this for a moment. You really ARE in charge of creating your own life.

The Thought Streaming Process
Many people go through their lives paying little or no attention to their active thought process. They are largely unaware of how their mind works: What it tends to pay attention to, what it fears, what it says to itself, and evenwhat it chooses to simply ignore.

For the most part we eat, sleep, work, play, laugh, worry, hope, plan, love, hate, cook, drive, work out all with little thought as to how we think, or even what we are thinking.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.
If we gave conscious attention to virtually every one of our movements or actions, we would likely overload our brain with unimportant decisions.

But there’s another level of thinking we should give intense, dedicated attention to the thoughts that create our life reality.

Do you want to create a lifestyle more prosperous than your current lifestyle? Then you’ll have to develop and refine a prosperity-focused thought stream.

That’s easy to say, you may be thinking. When you’re successful it’s easy to think success, and when you’re rich it”s easy to think prosperity. But I”m not close to wealthy or successful. The conditions of my life are keeping me down.

Not so. There’s only one thing keeping any of us down our thoughts.

Your thoughts got you where you are today and they will keep you there, unless replaced with something more positive and powerful.

But, you CAN learn to direct your mind to create any lifestyle you desire.

The only true requirement is that you take action. Just wishing for something to change has no effect at all. You will always remain exactly as you are today, unless you take action, and change the focus and content of your thoughts.

Creating a Reality Shift
Assuming you DO want more prosperity, the place to start is by building a solid prosperity focused thought stream.

Start with a review of your current thoughts.

If you want financial abundance, but constantly think about your lack of money Â­you’re focusing your thought stream on the wrong end of the abundance stick. You need to take charge of the internal messages your subconscious mind is broadcasting.

Failure to pay attention leaves your subconscious mind in control. Then your subconscious will simply continue to reinforce the same thoughts that created the reality you have today.

Focus on feeling prosperous. Do not give attention to mental thoughts of lack. Replace them immediately with thoughts of prosperity.

Does this seem too simple? True, this takes no special abilities, intelligence or talent. It only requires a decision to take control of your thoughts. That’s it.

No matter what your past or present situation, or how many times you might have failed to reach your goals, you CAN change your life condition by simply paying attention to the thoughts streaming through your mind.

Give it a try, and watch your reality shift.

Your lifestyle is a mirror reflection of exactly how you think. Prosperity consciousness doesn’t just happen. You create it. Or you just continue to accept the crumbs that life happens to throw your way.

Change your thinking, and you change your life. Learn how to apply modern neuroscience insights to take control of your mental process fast. Click here

How Love Lights You Up
When you’re in love your eyes light up, your face lights up and so do four tiny portions of your brain.

Neurobiologists Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki of University College in London used MRI brain scans to peer into the brains of college students in the throes of that crazed, can’t-think-of-anything-else stage of early romantic love.

When the subjects were shown photographs of their sweet hearts, the MRI images showed that four parts of their brains lit up.

The researchers compared the MRI images to brain scans taken from people in different emotional states, including se.xual arousal, feelings of happiness and coc.aine-induced euphoria.

But the pattern for romantic love was unique. Interestingly, looking at a picture of their loved one also reduced activity in three portions of the brain active when one is upset or depressed.

Is Love Addictive?
When you fall in love your skin flushes, you breathe heavy, and your palms tend to sweat.

Why? Because your brain is experiencing a biochemical rush of dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine close chemical cousins to amphetamines.

But it’s easy to build up a tolerance to these stimulating bio-chemicals. Then, as with any other tolerance, it takes more of the substance to get that special feeling of infatuation.

Some neuroscientists theorize that folks who jump from one relationship to another are hooked on the intoxication of falling in love.

But interestingly, in the case of enduring romance, simply the presence of one’s partner stimulates the production of endorphins. Endorphins are the feel good biochemicals also behind the experience of runner’s high, and are natural pain-killers.

The Biology of Romance
Recent research suggests that romantic attraction is actually a primitive, biologically based drive just like hunger or thirst.

The biology of romance helps account for why we might travel cross-country for a single ki.ss, and plunge into hopeless despair if our beloved turns from us. It’s the drive for romance that enables us to focus on one particular person, although we often can’t explain why.

What we’re seeing here is the biological drive to choose a mate, to focus on one person to the exclusion of all others, claims Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University.

Research has proven that romantic attraction activates portions of the brain with high concentrations of receptors for dopamine, Fisher explains. And dopamine is the chemical messenger also tied to states of euphoria, craving and addiction.

Other scientific studies have linked high levels of dopamine and a related agent, norepinephrine to heightened attention and short-term memory, hyperactivity, sleeplessness and goal-oriented behavior.

Sound like love?

When they first fall in love, Fisher explains, couples often show the signs of surging dopamine: Increased energy, less need for sleep or food, and highly focused attention.

The Psychology of Love
Poets and song writers have long claimed that the power of the biochemical state we call romantic love is enough to blind one’s judgment.

We all know how new lovers tend to idealize their partner magnifying their virtues, and explaining away their flaws.

But though love may be blind, take hope.

Pamela Regan, a Cal State LA researcher, believes such idealization may be crucial to a long-term relationship. If you don’t sweep away the person’s flaws to some extent, you’re just as likely to end a relationship, she claims.

This at least gives you a chance, Regan feels. If you think of romantic attraction as a kind of drug that alters how you think, then in this case it’s allowing you to take some risks you wouldn’t otherwise take.

Not a bad thing.

But if passionate romance is like a drug, as the MRI images suggest, then it’s bound to lose its kick. But perhaps viewing romance as a biologically based, drug-like state can at least provide some balm for a broken heart.

Healthy RomanticizingIn a 1996 experiment, psychologists at the State University of New York at Buffalo followed a group of 121 dating couples. Every few months the couples answered questionnaires to find out how much they idealized their partner, and how well their relationship was doing.

The researchers discovered that the couples who idealized each other the most were closest one year later.

The Issue of Self-Love
How does the love of one’s selfÂ also known as a positive self concept or good self-esteem fit into this picture?

Recent research indicates that depressed people who feel ‘unloved’ are 50% more likely to get cancer.

Negativity, fear, anger and depression are not just in your head. They are biochemical states. Remember neuroscience has proven beyond a doubt that we can consciously create the biochemical states known as joy, happiness, motivation, and even ecstasy.